The River Cafe's Ruth Rogers: 'Do I wish we served cheaper food? I’ve thought about that a lot'

The nation’s eating habits have changed dramatically since Rogers opened her restaurant – focused on local, seasonal ingredients – 30 years ago. She says chefs aren’t control freaks but things turn frosty when we talk about food inequality …

‘I don’t get angry with people who don’t know what asparagus is’ … Ruth Rogers.
Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

The River Cafe is so clean, even the air looks as if it’s had a good bath. Smoked glass surfaces shimmer, stainless steel pans gleam; beneath the magenta dome of its wood-fired pizza oven are piled logs so pristine that you half suspect someone was tasked with scrubbing each one with a toothbrush. The restaurant resembles not so much a scene from real life as an artist’s impression of aesthetic perfection.

Its co-founder greets me with the polished warmth of the legendary metropolitan hostess she is. Now Lady Rogers, on account of being married to the celebrated architect Sir Richard, the American-born chef has lived in the UK since the age of 19, but retains the soft, upstate New York vowels of her youth. Her gaze is arresting, and her words waft out of her with appealingly effortless, vaguely hippyish ease. She is solicitous, self-possessed, and for the first few minutes appears perfectly at ease.

For three decades she has been serving Italian food to the type of London illuminati who favour understated artisanal chic on a plate. When Ruth Rogers and her late business partner Rose Gray first opened for business, “The image of Italian food was quite heavy – spaghetti, lasagne, parmesan cheese baked with eggplant and mozzarella”. The two women were not professional chefs, but had fallen in love with the simplicity of domestic Italian cooking – grilled fish with fresh herbs, polenta, bread and olive oil – and thought: “Why couldn’t we bring that kind of food to London?”

To celebrate the River Cafe’s 30th birthday, Rogers has published a new book: River Cafe 30, the introduction to which reads: “Much has changed – the way we eat, the way we shop, the way we cook.” Had we met when the restaurant first opened, how would she have said she hoped to help change the nation’s food culture? “We wanted to cook the way we shopped – and the way Italians shopped. You don’t go to the market with a recipe in your head; it’s all about seasonality, what’s in season.”

Rogers quickly became the poster girl for a culinary philosophy closer to Whole Foods Market than Iceland, so I’m curious to know whether today she feels our eating habits have improved as she had hoped. “I think what is bad is inequality. It’s terrible that in areas of poverty there are no greengrocers. If you go to Chelsea and Belgravia and Notting Hill, you don’t see a lot of overweight people around. But if you go to, you know, the poorer areas,” and her piercing blue eyes widen, “apparently even McDonald’s isn’t the cheapest. There are places cheaper than McDonald’s. So I don’t blame the mother that buys the cheap food. I don’t blame her. I don’t get angry with people who don’t know what asparagus is.”

Rogers with her late business partner Rose Gray at the River Cafe. Photograph: Gary Calton for the Observer

It’s an odd paradox, I agree, that we live in an Instagram era of clean eating and vegan smoothies, where many city high streets feature all manner of outlets selling fresh, healthy food – Leon, Pret A Manger, Itsu, none of which existed 30 years ago – and yet the majority of us eat less well and are fatter than ever before. How does she make sense of this puzzle?

“You’re talking to a person who likes big government. So I would say it starts really with how we feed pregnant women, how we feed poor people. It’s the responsibility of our government to teach this, to tax sodas, to make sure there’s a sustainable way of feeding people. This stuff comes from the top down, don’t you think? That’s what a society does.”

In its early years the River Cafe was synonymous with the lefty glamour of New Labour, and Rogers has always framed the restaurant as an ethical project. “We need,” as she tells me, “to constantly be talking about values.” But we are now in a new political era, I observe, where someone in her shoes gets accused by both the left and right of being part of the problem. Supporters of Jeremy Corbyn and Nigel Farage might say that it’s all very well for elite liberals such as her to lament the diet of the poor, but anyone involved in the machinery of inequality, selling exclusive £100-a-head lunches while families in nearby tower blocks rely on food banks, is implicated in its consequences.

“Oh I am, I agree,” she says at once, with a chilly expression that suggests she absolutely does not. “What I would say is: Is having a restaurant like the River Cafe the greatest act of social responsibility? Should I be working in other ways? I’d say that we do what we do here. The people who work here get fed very well, they get paid very well, I like to know that the homes they go to in the evenings are well-lit. I mean, I really do feel we run this business in a very ethical way for running a business. Do I wish that I could have a restaurant that served cheaper food? I’ve thought about that lots of times. If I could get myself even doing one more thing, I’d love to do maybe a pizza restaurant, serving good pizza. But you know, we’re doing an event for schools, I do the NSPCC, I can give you the list. I work for women’s refuges, you know, I’m totally engaged in the women’s march in Washington, so it is what it is.”

Thrown by this unexpected defensiveness, I quickly try to depersonalise the question. It’s the perennial dilemma of how best to achieve change, isn’t it, I suggest; do we campaign on a large scale, or create something we can control to model the change we’d like to see?

“I don’t know. You know, you could be not a journalist for the Guardian. You could be out there in Ethiopia, giving out food. We all make choices all of the time, and so I just don’t – that’s not – I don’t know ...” The temperature is plummeting with every syllable, as Rogers tails away into frosty silence.

She taps the glossy cook book lying on the table between us. “I thought we were here to talk about this book.” I thought we were going to have an interesting conversation about how our relationship with food has evolved in the past 30 years. “I’d like to, but you know, when you get into the moral dilemmas of inequality …” Her irritation is now icy. “I feel passionate about school, you know, educating, feeding, being sustainable,” she murmurs, addressing the tablecloth. “If you think therefore I’m a hypocrite, then I don’t know what to say.”

Getting briskly to her feet, Rogers takes charge. She leads me to the kitchen, introduces her staff, summons one of the head chefs, Sian Wyn Owen, and tells me to interview her while she goes off to complain to her PR. I try to think of some questions for Wyn Owen. Umm, how does she decide what to put on the menu? She says she thinks about what she feels like eating each morning while she cycles to work. Presently Rogers rejoins us. I ask about the restaurant’s 50% female employee policy.

“That’s not our goal,” she says. “Our goal is 100%. We don’t have a kind of like: ‘Now we’re 50% we’re happy.’ Never. No, we’d never say 50% is OK, ’cos it’s not. What we’re saying is that if we’re under 50% it just doesn’t work as well.” What happens? Rogers turns to Wyn Owen: “What would you say?”

“Well, the other night I was the only woman on shift, and it just felt different,” she offers.

“You need both,” says Rogers. “So we always aim for that. It is what it is.” Then she summons the restaurant manager, Vashti Armit, to our table. “She’s great,” Rogers assures me. “You’ll like Vashti. Vashti, this is Decca. Poor Decca, no choice here!” she laughs. Rogers, I realise, is now expecting me to interview all three of them.

Nonplussed, I explain that it isn’t usually up to the interviewee to unilaterally reconfigure the conversation, any more than a customer would show up in the River Cafe kitchen and tell Rogers what to put on her menu. “OK, yes, of course,” she concedes elegantly, but then sets about interviewing Armit herself. “Would you say a lot of people take pictures of their food?” Yes, that happens a lot. “Would you say we have more than 50% of women front of house?”

Lady Rogers with her husband Richard. Photograph: Richard Young/REX FEATURES

I explain again that it doesn’t make any sense to use the time we have interviewing her colleagues. Rogers reluctantly dispatches the manager, but continues to refer my questions to Wyn Owen. Eventually I try one that can’t possibly be subcontracted to the chef, and ask if the age gap with her husband – she is 69, he is 83 – feels as if it is expanding as they both grow older. Rogers glares. “You are here to talk about the book.”

Rogers has been asked to open other River Cafes all over the world. “But for us, it’s really about ambition and control. So we might be ambitious about having a restaurant – and we could have – in Hong Kong, New York, Dubai, California. And then I think, it’s about control.” Should someone complain about a poorly cooked veal chop in Miami, she explains, and she wasn’t there, then that would be a problem.

The River Cafe has one Michelin star, and Rogers thinks the reason why they’ve never received a second is because they use paper tablecloths. “But these are brilliant,” she says, stroking the paper. “Kids draw on them. We would never get rid of them. It’s part of who we are. Also, it’s clean. It’s so beautifully clean. I really like attention to detail. I like places to be beautifully clean.”

I spend the rest of the day puzzling about this encounter. The only other subjects who have been equally unwilling to submit to the terms of an interview and allow me to ask them questions, I realise, were Gordon Ramsay and Jamie Oliver. The cliche of the chef as a control freak is only reinforced when the PR calls me to say that we’ll obviously now have to pull the interview. I call the photographer and learn that Rogers was fuming throughout the photo shoot, raging about my questions.

And then she sends me a text message. She “really liked talking together” and has “always admired” my work. Could we talk? Bewildered, I call.

“Decca, Decca!” she purrs down the line. “I’m so sorry you were upset!” But by all accounts, I say, it’s she who was upset. “No, not at all!”

She is just “hopelessly inclusive” – that’s why she wanted me to interview her colleagues. Could she invite me to her house and cook for me while we did the interview all over again? Not because she cares about what I’ll write – “No, no, I don’t care if you say Ruthie Rogers is this or that” – but because she admires me so much.

I say I came away with the impression that chefs really are as controlling as people say. “No! In fact, I’m far too passive. I’m the least controlling person I know.”

River Cafe 30 by Ruth Rogers, Rose Gray, Joseph Trivelli and Sian Wynn Owen is published on 5 October (Ebury Press, £28). To order a copy for £23.80 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.